Spotlights: Nicola Tesla

When you start researching who Nikola Tesla was and what his legacy is, you start to realize that he was one of the greatest inventors of the 19th and early 20th century.
He was born on July 10, 1856, in Smiljan, then Austrian Empire to a Serbian Orthodox Church priest Milutin Tesla and Đuka Tesla.
It was his mother that initially sparked Nikola’s interest in making things. She was quite versed in making all kinds of home tools and mechanical devices.

Nikola Tesla received gymnasium education and later enrolled to Polytechnic in Graz, Austria.
He dropped out of school and went to Budapest where he worked in a telegraph company and it was not long before he became chief electrician in Budapest Telephone Exchange.
In 1884, he arrived to New Year where he started working for Edison. After he improved Edison’s inefficient motors, Edison didn’t hold his word to pay 50,000 dollars for improvements and Tesla immediately left Edison’s company.
Tesla then established his own laboratory where he could experiment on his own. He went on to discover electron, X-rays, rotating magnetic field, electrical resonance, cosmic radio waves and invented wireless remote control, radio, electric motor and many other things that profoundly changed the world.

Today, he is best known for his contribution in building the Niagara Falls Power Plant and for his work on alternating current which became a standard and is used to this day.
He died on January 7, 1943, in New York City, United States.